New fast and efficient way to work with Encrypted Western Digital HDD

Currently, the work with the encrypted Western Digital drives has become faster and more convenient. Previously, engineers could spend many days to recover data from the encrypted WD HDD, but now the issue with the encrypted drive can be solved within a moment.

The PC-3000 WD Marvell utility has a new mode to handle the Fully Encrypted Western Digital USB HDD. This mode provides “on-the-fly” software decryption which allows to work with the encrypted WD drives in the Data Extractor without transferring data on a healthy drive.

The following USB bridges are supported now:

INIC-1607E (Initio)

JSM-538

JSM-539 (Jmicron)

SW6316

OXUF943 (PLXTexnology)

The software decryption keeps the data transfer rate almost at the same level reducing it just for 10-15% for the modern computers.

For the external HDD with USB<->SATA controller board it is enough to take the drive from the case and connect it to the PC-3000. To work with the drives which have the embedded USB<->SATA bridge you have to either replace a compatible SATA PCB with ROM transfer or connect (solder) SATA interface to the original PCB. Also you can work via COM port without any additional actions, but COM port will significantly reduce the data transfer rate.

To keep safe the drive surface when you create a Data Extractor task you can run the WD Marvell utility and define encryption parameters only once. And then all encryption parameters will be saved and you will be able to use it the next time when the task is opened again. To start the data decryption “on-the-fly” you have to run the WD utility, create a new task in the Data Extractor and select the decryption as a reading mode in the Data Extractor parameters.

This new feature will be available in the next release in September, 2014